A toast to the bad old days

The Democratic president was at loggerheads with the House Republican leader after a rancorous session of Congress. A liberal White House adviser badmouthed the leader to the press, and the president had to apologize. In the end, a bipartisan Christmas spirit prevailed, and the business of governing got done.

The president was Lyndon Johnson and the House Republican was Charles Halleck, but the situation they found themselves in exactly 50 years ago on Monday, Dec. 23, 1963, has relevance for Barack Obama and John Boehner, and the annus horribilis that is now ending in Washington.

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If the past few weeks in the capital have shown anything, it is that the time-honored traits and tactics that modern politics loves to demonize in fact still have much to recommend them. Just consider, in this holiday season, the utility of the backroom deal, the power of brotherhood (or sisterhood, as the case may be), and, yes, the effectiveness of strong drink.

Examples are easy to find. Where would Washington be this Christmas Eve if Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) had not met quietly in private to split their differences over the budget and produce a deal that actually passed both houses of Congress, despite some grumbling? And how much longer would the pointless government shutdown and debt ceiling debacle have dragged on if Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and her distaff colleagues of both parties had not begun searching for a way out of the woods — based not on ideological agreement, but shared friendship and sense of purpose?

Imagine for a moment what magic might yet be wrought if earmarks — those much-maligned but highly useful instruments of pork-barrel persuasion — were once again available to grease the wheels of the legislative process. Or if more people in positions of power drank on the job.

The great civil rights bills of the 1960s, the laws that made Obama’s presidency possible in the first place, emerged not from some civics textbook pageant, but from secret, closed-door, bipartisan negotiations that allowed all sides to test positions without posturing, and ultimately to compromise without being accused of surrendering — too much. So the recent glimmers of bipartisan cooperation, however tentative, offer some reason for hope.

Even the beleaguered Obama, who has just undergone the worst patch of his presidency, was willing to look on the bright side. “It’s probably too early to declare an outbreak of bipartisanship,” he said at his year-end news conference. “But it’s also fair to say that we are not condemned to endless gridlock.”

Aides report that the president’s eyes glaze over at invocations of Lyndon Johnson’s persuasive powers. But he could do worse than to harken to the Ghost of Christmas past when it comes to the rewards of turning on the charm.

Johnson was barely a month into his presidency and facing a defining test of wills with congressional Republicans. Charlie Halleck, the scrappy House Republican leader from Indiana, was in trouble with the conservative hotspurs in his party, who were still smarting at his support of John F. Kennedy’s pending civil rights bill. So as the longest peacetime session of Congress in history to that point came to a close, Halleck decided to block a provision in a foreign aid appropriations bill that would have given the president discretion to allow the Export-Import Bank to provide credit guarantees for private grain sales to Communist countries.

An unnamed White House source told the columnist Mary McGrory of The Washington Star that Halleck’s move was an attempt by the “Midwest isolationist wing” of the GOP to “impose its will upon the foreign policy of the United States." (That’s not so piquant an insult as the newly named White House adviser John Podesta’s recent comparison of the House Republicans to cultists, but it landed with the same sort of thud).

Members of Congress had already begun drifting out of town for the holiday break, and a snowstorm impeded their return, but Johnson began rounding them up for a revote, and on Monday, Dec. 23, when the grain provision came up again, the measure needed a two-thirds majority for procedural reasons — and it failed.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Johnson exclaimed when his congressional liaison, Larry O’Brien, gave him the news. He had already decided on a battle plan, calling out to his wife, “Bird! Let’s have Congress over tonight!”

So at 5 p.m., just as the black crepe of mourning for President John F. Kennedy was coming down after 30 days, and Christmas greenery was going up, Johnson welcomed more than 200 members to the East Room for a bourbon-and-eggnog reception, lighting a big yule log in the fireplace himself. Then he stood up on a small gilt chair and apologized to Charlie Halleck, “if anyone down here said anything ugly about you.”

“We’re Americans first,” he added. “I hope we can disagree without being disagreeable.” The foreign aid bill passed the next morning, in a special 7 a.m. vote in the House. “At that moment,” Johnson would later recall, “the power of the government began flowing back to the White House.”

The applicability of this parable for the present day has its limits, of course. Even the confessedly bibulous John Boehner does not imbibe on the prodigious scale that Halleck did. (“Every time I talk to him, he’s drinking,” Johnson once told Larry O’Brien, who replied, “Yeah, well, you catch him after lunch, that’s the way it has to be.”)

And Obama has long since shown himself to have something close to contempt for the animal instinct for political give-and-take that LBJ exuded from every pore.

But if Washington can’t hope for at least a bit of a miracle at this time of year, when could it ever? We’ve tried just about everything else in unlucky 2013. How about a toast to the bad old days, for Auld Lang Syne?